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Trans-Am 2 emerges as affordable racing series

By Chris Thompson, 04 Apr 2017News

If you don’t have a few million lying around to start up a race team, TA2 could be for you.

If you’ve ever wondered if there’s such thing as cheap racing, there isn’t. But relatively cheap racing? We’ve found just the thing.

The Australian Trans-Am series has been around for a while, but most of us can’t afford to drop a few hundred thousand on turning a classic car into a track-going thrasher.

Not too long ago, the Trans-Am 2 (or TA2) series appeared, which got us talking about just how much it would cost to get our hands on a car and start throwing it around Lakeside Raceway.

It turns out that entering the TA2 series is actually quite inexpensive when you consider some motorsports will happily siphon you of your dollars by the millions.

We’re told the price of a brand new, factory standard TA2 car costs about $120,000. That comes with an LS3 power plant and the same gear you’d find in your opposition’s cars.

It began when Craig Harris and Peter Robinson were discussing Robinson’s plans to enter a new Camaro in the Sports Sedans category. The pair eventually decided the car needed its own class, and Harris imported a Mustang to serve as a rival.

After a short while a V8 Supercars-style Ford vs GM rivalry developed, with vehicle regulations reminiscent of NASCAR.

Competition is kept fierce through vehicular equality. Everyone running LS3s married to the same gearboxes, ECUs, and using the same tyres means competition is fed by skill on the track more than skill behind a spanner.

At $500 entry for each round, we can see why the TA2 series is so attractive to racers who don’t have huge resources at hand. The cars even run on readily available 98, none of that fancy supercar juice in sight.